Saturday, May 7, 2016

Guest Post: Interview with Sudhir Hazareesingh by Alexander Hurst

GUEST POST

This interview with Sudhir Hazareesingh was conducted by Alexander Hurst.

At the beginning of one of the final episodes of Des Paroles et Des Actes, a political show known for the marathon of
incisive questioning it throws at politicians, the French philosopher Alain
Finkielkraut pulled out a reproduction of a painting by the late 19th
century Nabi Edouard Vuillard, of a
woman standing in a corridor, bathed in golden yellow light. The painting,
Finkielkraut said, symbolized France because the nation was “an incarnation of
the feminine,” and hence its intransigence in banning the burka.

You
don’t have to agree with Finkielkraut to appreciate the moment as
quintessentially French. Sudhir Hazareesingh, a French historian who teaches at
Oxford and author of How the French
Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People, certainly
doesn’t. “If he just stuck to literature, he would be great,” Hazareesingh
laments. “Instead of peddling this dark, gloomy, pessimistic, self-pitying
nationalism.” But in that moment, Finkielkraut incarnated what Hazareesingh
devotes a book to meticulously detailing. If that book’s sweeping argument were
crystallized in a few short sentences, it might go something like this: France
still believes in the intrinsic value of ideas and in the public intellectuals
that engage them. Along with the mythical place of résistance, this is a fundamental part go France’s national
self-identity. And one of its great malheurs
is that it still cares about ideas in a world that is often too busy to stop
and think.

We’re
sitting in a relatively noisy café at the London School of Economics, drinking
coffee that grazes the upper tier of mediocre, when I ask Hazareesingh if Des Paroles et Des Actes is a window
into something that France holds on to and won’t let go of. “France has this
kind of intellectual, literary tradition that goes back to the late middle
age-early modern period, whose high tide is the Enlightenment,” he answers.
“All the great writers are also philosophers—there is no separation between
Voltaire and Rousseau, who are not just writers, but also people who have grand
theories about how society should be. And of course that goes on to shape the
French Revolution and Republican tradition in the nineteenth century.”

“They
see themselves as a nation of resistance,” he says, “And it is something
fundamental to their identity and values.”Philosophy, revolution. Words, acts. The
Cartesian poles of French identity?

***

Ever since its Revolution, France has been marked by a
universalist character that perhaps only one other nation has shared to the
same degree—the United States. “A comparison
with America is appropriate insofar as they both see themselves as countries
that, since their revolution, have a universal vocation,” Hazareesingh says
when I bring up the potential similarity. “But the American Revolution didn’t
start like that,” he points out. “It’s particularly with the rise of American
power after 1945 that the United States has seen itself as a beacon for the
promotion of liberal values around the world.” Though French universalism is
much older, the outcome is similar: When you think that you have values—or even
a language--that you think everyone else should share, you go through cycles,
waves of optimism and decline, he explains.

He
makes another comparison between the United States and France. In the 1970’s,
he says, the US was called out of a morose mindset by the “morning in America”
message of Ronald Reagan. (Hazareesingh, who situates himself on the political
left, doesn’t intend that as an endorsement of the economic policies Reagan
promoted.) He thinks that the French political landscape could be propitious
for a Reagan-like leader to emerge in that sense of a call to optimism. “In
France one person who makes it to the top has extraordinary power to shape the
collective narrative in the way that he wants. The last person who tried was
Sarkozy, who wanted to remake France in a different way, though he didn’t think
it through. He was impulsive and impetuous.”

For
now, though, potential remains potential. Hazareesingh sees no collective
vision emerging that could bring forth a more optimistic Républicanisme. “That idea used to be the European project,” he
says, “Which France was a leader in building.” And which at the moment is
teetering on multiple edges.

***

Perhaps a uniquely French way forward might lie in
reconnecting with the idea of solidarité,
as elaborated by the somewhat obscure French statesman Leon Bourgeois in 1896
as a middle path between capitalism and socialism. Bourgeois argued argued that cooperation, not competition, was the
prime mover of human nature. Because we naturally exist in intricately
interdependent ways, we each have an implicit obligation to the embodiment of
that interdependence—society. We cannot help but live our lives, in a way, on
the shoulders of giants, and thus we can only truly be free when we pay this
debt forward to following generations by contributing to human progress.

“If you look at the amount that is spent on
health, at the high level of taxation, that shows that the idea is still
alive,” Hazareesingh says. The trouble
though, he continues, is twofold. The first is whether with government spending
already at some of the highest levels in the OECD, further economic solidarity
can really be the basis for a comprehensive modern political philosophy.
“Everyone agrees not to become laissez-faire, but how far can that keep going?”
Hazareesingh asks rhetorically.

Also troubling to Hazareesingh is the realization
that true social solidarity might be running headfirst into modern conceptions
of laicité. As the far right—Marine Le Pen, in particular—has seized laicité as
a means to normalization, observers of France like Hazareesingh think that what
began as justifiable secular philosophy has morphed into something an
antagonistic almost-ideology, more like laicisme.
“It has become about the expulsion of religion from everywhere but the private
sphere and the home; religion in general is seen as not republican,”
Hazareesingh says.

France’s love of abstraction compounds social
problems, he says, by making it difficult to “conceptualize the particular,” or
in the case of integration, to legitimize diversity. In the abstract, the
Republic acts as an enormous tricolore rug, pushing out of view everything that
it covers. Indeed, the French state itself is restricted from collecting any
statistic about race or religion; French is French is French. Identity then
becomes a binary question of French or,
when it might be better served by a more inclusive French and. Better thought of, perhaps, as a Republican rug that
obscures nothing, but is composed of everything.

3 comments:

I found How the French Think excellent. I had a lot to learn, although I grew up in France (not smoking). I was amused by the two covers, and the commentary on how the French may think. In the UK, BHL with a cigarette. In the US, just a cigarette.

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I have been a student and observer of French politics since 1968. In that time I've translated more than 130 books from the French, including Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. I chair the seminar for visiting scholars at Harvard's Center for European Studies and am a member of the editorial board of French Politics, Culture, and Society and of The Tocqueville Review/La revue Tocqueville. You can read some of my writing on French politics and history here and a short bio here. From time to time I will include posts by other students of France and French politics (accessible via the index link "guest"). My hope is that this site will become a gathering place for all who are interested in discussing and analyzing political life in France. You can keep track of posts on Twitter by following "artgoldhammer".